> > If Oracle /Sun truly desire Open Solaris or Solaris to be a viable > > alternative to Windows and expand their userbase and financial bottom line I don't see how Oracle / Sun is really going to expand its bottom line by spending a huge amount of money supporting an end-user operating system that is given away FOR FREE. Just where is the revenue supposed to come from?
Mac and Windows, which together have well over 90% market share, cost money to buy. That pays for the development, and end-user support. As much as we all love Linux, its adoption is still in the single-digit percentage range. Canonical and Red Hat have ways to make money, but neither is anywhere close to knocking off Apple or Microsoft. Not by a longshot. > I don't think most people (oracle especially) are > interested in solaris/opensolaris replacing the home user/end user > operating system. > I'm not saying you can't use it for that purpose; just as there's nothing > preventing you from using Windows as an apache server Actually, if you buy standard supported hardware (I have a Dell Precision Workstation), it can work like a charm out of the box. I had a slightly frustrating experience getting it up and running, because it is different from the Linux way of doing things, and it's not just command syntax, but whole concepts. Under the hood, however, I think people here would agree that the code quality and design are a bit better than Linux. ZFS, for example, is so incredibly powerful---but it's unlike any filesystem that you'll have seen if you only deal with Windows / Mac / Linux, where you have partitions that you explicitly manage. Yet the benefits of understanding it are enormous. I use OpenSolaris as my normal desktop, with WinXP running in VirtualBox. This is the best of both worlds: I have all of my Windows applications running, with ZFS underneath to ensure file protection, replication, deduplication and integrity. After having lost RAIDs over the years to bad cables, bad drives, and the worst, a bad controller card, that data security is worth a tremendous amount of time, money and hassle invested in getting the data infrastructure secured. I think what one must remember is that the design goals are different for these operating systems. This may lead to different typical usage, but I wouldn't go so far to say that OpenSolaris is worse than Ubuntu on the desktop experience, because you have to consider not just the initial install, but what happens when something breaks. And things seem to break a little more often for me in Ubuntu, even though it supports more hardware, than OpenSolaris. I think it's also clear that there has been far less investment in making it easier for people to understand why OpenSolaris is different from, and in which ways better than, Linux and Mac. Consider this an advertising issue; but again Oracle / Sun doesn't yet have a model whereby they will benefit financially in the short term by widespread adoption by end users and other people that don't have a specific interest in OpenSolaris features. There is, in my view, a great incentive for Oracle / Sun to continue to support the development of the OpenSolaris ecosystem. They can control and optimize it to work with Oracle's database, and sell a one-stop appliance box that allows complete optimization top-to-bottom. That will be worth a ton of money, and the security that ZFS and other tools provide are ideal. Finally, I'd hope that people would continue to be patient. Oracle's acquisition of Sun was an enormous undertaking, and it doesn't make sense that they would make release of dev versions of this one product their top priority. It also seems that they don't want to release anything they support as "stable" until it's ready. I wish Microsoft, Apple and Canonical all had the same commitment to quality. If you think it's terrible to wait a few months for news, I'd say it's far worse to clean up the mess left by code that isn't quite ready (like Ubuntu 9.10, which should have been delayed a month). And given that none of us really pay for anything, it's hard to argue that we have any real standing to complain. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
